Given my heritage and the ordeal of my childhood, I sometimes wonder why I myself am not insane. Maybe I am.

Night has patterns that can be read less by the living than by the dead.

In real life during the last decade of the twentieth century, Rumpelstiltskin would probably get the queen's daughter. He would no doubt addict her to heroin, turn her out as a prostitute, confiscate her earnings, beat her for pleasure, hack her to pieces, and escape justice by claiming that society's intolerance for bad-tempered, evil-minded trolls had driven him temporarily insane.

What looks tragic might be comic on second consideration, and what is comic might bring tears in time.

What doesn't quicken dies. That's an indisputable truth of life.

If someone wrote it and it had a peculiar twist, I've read it.

That was one of the most fundamental and sacred duties good friends and families performed for one another! They tended the flame of memory, so no one’s death meant an immediate vanishment from the world; in some sense the deceased would live on after their passing, at least as long as those who loved them lived. Such memories were an essential weapon against the chaos of life and death, a way to ensure some continuity from generation to generation, an order of endorsement and meaning.